Cuban and Haitian migration has resulted in Santería and Vodou communities in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. Their membership has expanded beyond their original ethnic and national constituencies to include converts from mainstream Western religions. Although sexual minorities drawn to these traditions have encountered homophobia in some circles, leading to the establishment of gay templos, many others have found acceptance and a spiritual home within the faith.

Conner and Sparks devote the heart of their study to interviews with gay devotees in the U.S. and Cuba, as well as with Brazilian- and Haitian-born gay men and lesbians residing in the U.S. They cite numerous glbtq artists who sought the orishas' influence, including poet Audre Lorde, who considered herself a daughter of Ellegguá; Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite, a Vodou houngan; celebrated Cuban writer José Lezama Lima; and transgender writer and actor Max Valerio.

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Conner relates a story told by a gay initiate who reported that another devotee, who did not know about his sexuality, became possessed by the orisha Shangó, who said to him: "Do not use whom you love as a reason to be afraid of me." The significance of this anecdote is that Shangó, whose association with machismo has sometimes caused him to be seen as unfriendly to gays, is here depicted as an accepting and reassuring "voice" to a gay man.

Tradition and Adaptation

Scholars Matory and Clark, who examine aspects of gender fluidity in New World expressions of Yoruba religion, discern allusions to these traits in the Yoruba language. For example, both males and females possessed by an orisha are said to be "mounted," the term also used for the passive role in sex. The orisha is regarded as taking the male role, regardless of either the orisha's or the devotee's gender. Initiates undergoing affiliation with an orisha are called "iyawó," which also means "bride"--again, regardless of either the orisha's or the devotee's gender.

Some Yoruba traditionalists vehemently oppose such semantic associations and the implications drawn from them. Scholar Oyeronke Oyewumi, as quoted in Conner and Sparks, objects in particular to applying Western gender paradigms to traditional Yoruba culture.

Conner's presentation at a 2003 Havana conference on glbtq associations in Yoruba religion was denounced by Nigerian religious officials who view homosexuality as a foreign aberration, despite overwhelming evidence of same-sex relationships that long pre-date contact with the West. (It should be noted that traditionalists also object to Catholic influences in orisha worship.)

Against the objections of purists, however, African diasporic religions have adapted to New World contexts with remarkable resiliency. They will likely continue evolving and reaching out to an ever-broadening base of membership, including glbtq devotees who find particular relevancy in certain orishas.

With reports from hundreds of sub-Saharan African locales of male-male sexual relations and from about fifty of female-female sexual relations, it is clear that same-sex sexual relations existed in traditional African societies, though varying in forms and in the degree of public acceptance

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

Shamanism describes various people in indigenous ("tribal") communities who might also be termed "medicine men," "witch doctors," "healers," and "sorcerers": people who engage with spirits for certain socially sanctioned tasks.

Primarily a nature religion that seeks to commune with the divine through the contemplation and celebration of nature and its mysteries, Wicca--like other contemporary pagan traditions--celebrates our existence in this world.